St. Paul, MN (August, 2019)--Is your farm implementing sustainable practices? Could your farm be even more environmentally friendly? Are your management practices energy efficient?
Field to Market, a multistakeholder alliance for sustainable agriculture, offers free and confidential tools that answer these questions and empower sustainability efforts. Farmers, suppliers, retailers, brands, and consultants can use the Fieldprint® Platform to measure the environmental impacts of commodity crop production and discover opportunities for improvement.
The Fieldprint® Platform is science based, outcomes based, and technology neutral and focuses on top commodities, including cotton, alfalfa, rice, barley, corn, and potato. Through the free Fieldprint® Calculator, farmers are able to simultaneously evaluate productivity, profitability, and sustainability across eight metrics: biodiversity, energy use, greenhouse gas emissions, irrigation water use, land use, soil carbon, soil conservation, and water quality.
In the webcast "Benchmarking Sustainability Performance: Utilizing the Fieldprint® Platform to Document and Demonstrate Continuous Improvement," Field to Market Program Manager Lexi Clark introduces the Fieldprint® Calculator and shows how farmers can use the tool to analyze how their management choices impact operational efficiency and natural resources.
The Fieldprint® Calculator collects data by asking farmers to answer questions about their management practices (including rotation, cover crops, irrigation, and drainage systems), nutrient and fertilizer applications, pest management, land and habitat management, and conservation practices. The calculator uses this information to determine greenhouse gas and energy use and provide analysis relating to the aforementioned metrics.
Most usefully, the Fieldprint® Calculator provides each user with opportunities for improvement across all eight metrics and identifies which management practices are successful and which could be modified. These suggestions can help growers increase crop yield and save money while making environmentally friendly choices. Viewers can learn how to use the calculator in this open-access webcast.
This 22-minute presentation is available through the "Focus on Cotton" resource on the Plant Management Network. This resource contains more than 75 webcasts, along with presentations from six conferences, on a broad range of aspects of cotton crop management: agronomic practices, diseases, harvest and ginning, insects, irrigation, nematodes, precision agriculture, soil health and crop fertility, and weeds. These webcasts are available to readers open access (without a subscription).
The "Focus on Cotton" homepage also provides access to "Cotton Cultivated," a new resource from Cotton Incorporated that helps users quickly find the most current cotton production information available. These and other resources are freely available courtesy of Cotton Incorporated at http://www.plantmanagementnetwork.org/foco.
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About Plant Management Network: Plant Management Network (PMN) is a cooperative, not-for-profit resource for the applied agricultural and horticultural sciences. Together with more than 80 partners, which include land-grant universities, scientific societies, and agribusinesses, PMN publishes quality, applied, and science-based information for practitioners. All subscription-based information on PMN can be accessed for an annual subscription fee.
About the Cotton Board: The Cotton Research & Promotion Act established the Cotton Board as a quasi-governmental, nonprofit entity to serve as the administrator of the Cotton Research & Promotion Program. Funded by America's cotton producers and importers through the cotton check-off, the program's research and promotion activities are conducted worldwide by Cotton Incorporated, the Cotton Board's sole-source contracting organization, to increase the demand for and improve the market position of cotton.
The Cotton Research & Promotion Program continues to work in all areas of cotton's pipeline--from the field to the consumer--to keep cotton the number-one fiber choice in the United States. For more information about the Cotton Board and the innovative activities stemming from the program, visit http://www.cottonboard.org.